Brace Yourself, We’re All Gonna DIE in 12 Years! Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez, a former bartender, said so in 2019!

But first let’s get some perspective.  In the 1970s, it was “settled science” that an ICE AGE was imminent!

“‘The trouble with almost all environmental problems,’ says Paul R. Ehrlich, the population biologist, ‘is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead. … We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.’” — The New York Times, 1969.

“No real action has been taken to save the environment, [Ehrlich] maintains. And it does need saving. Ehrlich predicts that the oceans will be as dead as Lake Erie in less than a decade.” — Redlands Daily Facts, 1970.

“Scientist Predicts a New Ice Age by 21st Century: Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century. … If the current rate of increase in electric power generation continues, the demands for cooling water will boil dry the entire flow of the rivers and streams of continental United States. … By the next century ‘the consumption of oxygen in combustion processes, world-wide, will surpass all of the processes which return oxygen to the atmosphere.’” — The Boston Globe, 1970.

“The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. … ‘In the next 50 years,’ the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees. If sustained ‘over several years’ — ‘five to 10,’ he estimated — ‘such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!’” — Washington Post, Times Herald, 1971.

“Dear Mr. President: … We feel obliged to inform you on the results of the scientific conference held here recently. … The main conclusion of the meeting was that a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon. The cooling has natural cause and falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age. … The present rate of the cooling seems fast enough to bring glacial temperatures in about a century.” — Brown University, Department of Geological Sciences, 1972.

“However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing.
“Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ICE AGE. Telltale signs are everywhere — from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7⁰ F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year-round.” — Time magazine, 1974.
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However, the NEW alarms are not for a coming Ice Age.  What we “know” (🙄) so far:

“A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” — Associated Press, 1989.

“Unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.” — Vice President Al Gore, 2006.

“The world is going to end in 12 years if we do not address climate change.” — January 21, 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D- Rep from NY and former bartender.
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In the text, Inconvenient Facts, Gregory Wrighthouse points out that the coming Ice Age was “settled science” in the 1960s and 70s.  What a difference a day (or politician) makes!

Wrighthouse accurately points that “Unlike religion, science is not a belief system…. Science is not consensus and consensus is not science.”  He goes on to quote Michael Crichton, “There is no such thing as consensus in science.  If it’s consensus, it is not science.  If it’s science, it is not consensus.”

Maimonides wrote, “Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.”  

He also points out the most feared calamity associated with global warming is sea-level rise, predicted in 2005 by the UN Environmental Program to produce 50 million climate refugees by 2010, displaced by sea-level rise.  Well, we know how that panned out.  The Bahamas, St. Lucia, Seychelles and the Solomon Islands were to be some of the worst affected but are now thriving very nicely in spite of the horror of climate change.

At the writing of Wrighthouse’s book, the UN had adjusted its prognosis to the same number of climate refugees by 2020.  Printed in 2017, well, that did not quite work out, either.

The most recent headlines in National Geographic report unnamed NASA scientists, as well as some who put their names in, saying the ocean will rise between 11-38 inches by 2100, and possibly as much as 18 feet in a couple more centuries!
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/150827-NASA-climate-oceans-seas-greenland
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/greenland-ice-sheet-predicts-sea-level-rise-climate-change

In State of Fear, a novel by Michael Crichton, he noted the advantages of creating a constant drumbeat of fear in populations to get cooperation.  And Mr. Wrighthouse begins his very readable text with a quote from H.L. Menken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

The more things change, the more they remain the same.
“While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:22)
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For more on the absurdities of “climate science by consensus,” read on from way back in 2012 before we “understood” the danger:

UN Climate Report Reveals the Crisis Is About Truth, Not Climate
by Jason Isaac, August 12, 2012, Epoch Times

The United Nations’ latest climate change report sparked predictable hyperventilating. You’ve seen the headlines crying, “Code Red for Humanity” and clamoring about “extreme” and “unprecedented” warming likely to be “irreversible” — accompanied by fear-mongering images of raging wildfires and flooded towns.

Fortunately, the true state of our climate is far from disastrous. In fact, both climate science and thousands of years of human history show this is the best time yet to be alive. The UN is continually moving the goalposts when its apocalyptic predictions fail to come true.

The problem with climate science today is not so much the science as shoddy reporting that over-simplifies and over-dramatizes — and a toxic political climate (pun intended) that forbids deviation from the politically correct narrative.

The computer models used by the UN and every other climate-focused entity around the world are statistical projections, not precise calculations. The specific models cited in the latest UN report are designed to offer a broad range of possible outcomes and formulated using highly suspect and outdated criteria. Yet the report focuses heavily on the model scenarios known to be extremely unlikely — garnering over 40 percent of mentions and almost 100 percent of media coverage.

These same models show that even totally eliminating fossil fuel consumption would have a microscopic influence on global temperatures — less than two-tenths of a degree Celsius even if the full Green New Deal was enacted immediately.

In reality, we know remarkably little about the effect of human activity on the climate. What the vast majority of us know about climate change we get from the news, and it sure seems like natural disasters such as floods, wildfires, and the recent heat waves in the Pacific Northwest are getting more common. But perception does not equal reality.

Global weather data shows hurricane activity and frequency have not increased over the long term. News articles fueling climate anxiety usually cite spurious graphs that start the timeline in the 1980s. But the world did not begin in the 1980s, and there have been several periods in history that saw the same, or worse, hurricane activity as we’re experiencing now.

Similarly, although you would not know it from the news, wildfires and floods are on the decline, and recent heat waves in the Pacific Northwest are small potatoes compared to the 180- and 240-year megadroughts the planet experienced between 800 and 1400 A.D.

The even better news? You and I are 99% less likely to die in a severe weather event than our great grandparents. In 1920, global climate-related disasters killed almost 500,000 people every year. Today, even though the world’s population has quadrupled, fewer than 20,000 die from climate-related disaster. In fact, cold-related deaths are over 40 times more common than heat-related deaths in the United States and Canada.

If we are becoming more resilient to disasters that are happening less often, what is the crisis?
It is not a climate crisis, but a crisis of truth.

The climate activists who demand “follow the science” appear remarkably uninterested in the nuances and uncertainties of the research they believe supports their ideology.

Science has never been about marching in lockstep with the mainstream. Its purpose has always been curiosity, testing new ideas, and striving to understand more about how the world works—even, and especially, if it proves a previous theory wrong. Even schoolchildren know to shake their heads in disdain at the politicians who persecuted Galileo for having the audacity to publish his theory about the solar system. Yet the same abuse of science is occurring every day as the left exploits misunderstandings of climate research (deliberately or not) to push a political agenda.

While activists march against fossil fuels and let their children believe their future has no hope amid rising seas and dying rainforests, they have turned a blind eye to the fact that humanity is better off now than it ever has been. Extreme poverty is at its lowest rate in recorded history, and people are living longer, healthier, freer, and more comfortable lives than ever before. Climate change or no climate change, the future is bright if we only look past the hysteria and seek to truly understand the world around us.

As former Obama-era undersecretary for science Steve Koonin explains in his book, Unsettled, climate reporting is like a game of telephone. The UN’s Sixth Assessment Report is a 3,949-page PDF! It is easy to understand why reporters on deadline fail to meticulously comb through the entire document or the catalog of research it cites. They simply do not have time to dig past the simplistic talking points, so they select the most shocking and click-inducing claims without delving into the methodology or scientific uncertainties. It is understandable, but it is also a disservice to the public. Something needs to change.

Instead of fixating on our climate, which is likely to remain mild and manageable as our resilience continues to improve, we should focus on sharing the affordable, reliable energy resources our nation is blessed with to fight poverty, improve environmental quality, and spread prosperity around the world.

The Honorable Jason Isaac is director of Life:Powered, a national initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation to raise America’s energy IQ. He previously served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.

The Two Greatest Fears

It seems like a terrifying time to be alive.  Fear and depression stats are off the charts as government officials warn to leave masks alone for health-care workers, then warn that if you do not wear a mask, you are committing a crime against your community.  Then you don’t need a mask anymore, then you must wear one.  And don’t even get me started on the politicization of gene therapy that has been misnamed “vaccines.”  When Michael Crichton wrote The State of Fear, I wonder how fully he realized how accurate he was.
Fear controls.  Fear restricts.  Fear dominates.  Fear enslaves.  Fear manipulates.
Laura Dodsworth, a British photo-journalist used a similar title for one of her books, A State of Fear and spoke to Epoch Times about it on American Thought Leaders.

Curiously, the most common first words out of angels’ mouths when they showed up in the Bible were, “Fear not.”  Unlike the nice little girls in a church Christmas pageant, they must be pretty scary when they materialize!

Scripture teaches there are two great fears every person has, and the first and foremost is fear of death.  There is a mystery in Hamlet’s “undiscovered country” that makes us willing to suffer all kinds of burdens because we do not know what lies beyond since no one has come back to tell us . . . except Jesus 😉.  And for those who have accepted His salvation, we can say with Paul, “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Corinthians 15:54-56)

Yet, even knowing what will happen AFTER I die does not completely remove the fear of this final baptism into the unknown.  Of course, there are matters of pain, disease, or injury that are frightening, but when you read of martyrs who gave up their lives rather than renounce faith in Jesus, one cannot help but be moved by the lack of fear!  Yet that hesitant fear remains.

It reminds me of my first time on a three-meter diving board.  I had fallen from higher limbs out of trees onto leafy ground.  The gym teacher had effectively taught me how to swim and I had even been in the “deep end” when swimming lengths of the pool.  The week before, everyone in the class had jumped or dived off the low board.  But as I climbed the 10 foot ladder to the platform my knees trembled and I was scared.  One after another, classmates before me walked up (in what seemed to me overconfidence or bravado) and just casually walked to the boundary of common sense and suddenly they were GONE!

The splash that followed 1.42 seconds later did not give me any more confidence.  I was going to leap to my death!!  But I knew the line behind me would want me to get over the brink as quickly as possible so they could jump, so steeling my spirit and mind against the despondence of my doom, I also walked up and off the edge!  The comfort of feeling the water enclose around me removed all my fear.  So I expect it will be something like this when I “cross the Jordan.”  Like the old hymn sang, “I won’t have to cross Jordan alone.”

But most of the people in the world do not have this comfort.  For them, the fear of death is paramount in their minds.  Everything they do (with the exception of adrenaline junkies) is to try to stay alive.  And even adrenaline junkies take precautions and plan their escapades in expectation that they will survive.  R.J. Corman reportedly offered $1,000,000 to his doctors for every year he lived after a cancer diagnosis in 2001.  Many octogenarians and older still look for organ transplants and medical ‘miracles’ that will keep them alive “just little longer.”  Without Jesus, death is the most fearsome adversary mankind faces.  Even though everyone will die at some point, many often go to extremes to put off this inevitable contest with an opponent who is destined to win.  Some even freeze their bodies in hopes that before frostbite sets in someone will come up with a cure for whatever is killing them!

The second greatest fear most people experience is, “What will the neighbors think!?”  Okay, maybe not neighbors, but someone else.  Fear of what other people think runs a very close second to the fear of death.  Some people even risk death to avoid being thought foolish or vain or somehow less than what they wish they were.  We joke in Kentucky, Bubba’s most common last words are, “Hey, ever-body, watch THIIIS!”

I recall when Nokia cell phones first came out, a man entering an elevator continued talking about his financial wizardry as we ascended 15 stories in the building.  What he did not notice was the light on the face of his phone had gone out, indicating he had lost the connection in the lift! 🙄  But rather than admit to us strangers that he was not as savvy as wanted us to think, he kept up the charade.

Jesus warned specifically not to fear what people may think of you.  “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves,… have no fear of them,… do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” (Matthew 10:16-28)  However, some authorities in Israel did not get the memo: “Nevertheless, many even of the authorities believed in Him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.” (John 12:42-43)  Sooo sad.

For the Christ-follower, this is an ongoing battle with the flesh, to be humble and obedient and not worry about what people think.  Some of us struggle with this more than others, but we are on the right path when we say with the author of Hebrews, ^“So we can confidently say, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?'” (Hebrews 13:6)

In Jesus discourse the night before His crucifixion He told His disciples, and by them tells us, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.“ (John 14:27)

“Oh, the worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until seventy-five and yet not ever truly to have lived.”   Martin Luther King, Jr. who was assassinated at age 39

Unmasking Masks – Intermezzo Guest Blog by Dr. Peter Weiss

“Don’t wear masks, now wear masks. Wear two masks, since two is better than one. Vaccines will set you free, until they don’t. Therapeutics that can treat COVID-19 are frowned upon, and you must be evil if you even suggest the possibility.”

Surgical masks mainly protect patients from droplets from the surgeon and the surgeon from blood splatter from the patient. They were not designed to protect against viruses. We upended our world with ineffective policies that have unintended consequences.
by Peter Weiss, August 11, 2021

I admit, I was nervous. I had about 30 minutes before I was needed in the operating room. My patient had active COVID-19, but needed emergency surgery. This was back in August 2020, pre-vaccine and mid-hysteria. I pushed the button for the basement. I hate basements.

As I walked in, the nurse was ready for me. I had to be form-fitted for my N95 mask. Form-fitting is critical for preventing any viral particles from sneaking in from the sides of the mask. I put the first one on. She then had me put a plastic hood over my head and upper body. She hooked up a tube and asked me to let her know if I sensed any bad smell or had any sour taste in my mouth [testing the mask]. Within five seconds, I was sick from the sour taste in the back of my throat. She quickly stopped and we repeated the same test with another N95. This time, it took 30 seconds. Luckily the third N95 fit, with no sour taste or smell even after three full minutes.

I was ready. I donned a form-fitted N95 mask, a bubble suit, double gloves, and goggles. It felt like I was in a bad movie, but this was really happening.

It’s now a year later and what have we learned about masks? Everything and yet nothing.

I was a co-author of a paper on N95 masks that was published in 2007 in the American Journal of Public Health. It was written by my brothers and niece, as well as myself. Yes, we’re all physicians. Dr. Martin Weiss was the lead author. It was titled “Disrupting the Transmission of Influenza A: Face Masks and Ultraviolet Light as Control Measures.”

One takeaway message from that article, which was written during the H1N1 scare, was that N95 masks can block 95 percent of particulate aerosols from penetrating into the mask, and we need to manufacture them now. They can block particles as small as 300 nanometers in size, which could block the COVID-19 virus.

Even though COVID is small enough to slide through the N95, the mask still has dense nanofibers that can catch droplets. In the operating room, it’s the best we have unless we have a full N100 respirator. Still, the N95 can capture the virus when expelled from an infected person, according to an article published in Nature Medicine in April, 2020.

The sad part is that our call for mass production of these masks back in 2007 went unheeded. We also stated that the goal is vaccines and therapeutics. While we have vaccines, therapeutics are lagging far behind. Even discussing therapeutics is frowned upon now.

Today, we’re constantly bombarded by recommendations and even orders to wear masks when outdoors. Los Angeles County, New York, and St. Louis all are implementing indoor mask mandates — again.

There was a time when we were told to wear them outside, even if alone. The problem with the best of intentions is that they can often lead to poor judgment. What constitutes a mask in the setting of COVID-19 restrictions? It’s worth unmasking masks.

Let’s start with N95, as I described above. To be effective, it has to be form-fitted. Not all N95’s fit properly, and they can leak viral particles. They’re actually called respirators, not masks. A mask mainly keeps the wearer from ejecting droplets or spray that affect others. A respirator provides two-way protection and can keep the wearer from catching aerosol particles from others.

There is even a N100, which does what it implies. N100 can block out the COVID, but good luck wearing it for any length of time. N95 respirators aren’t comfortable, and I have trouble wearing them for long periods of time. You really don’t want your surgeon uncomfortable. A number of colleagues and I have had to stop surgery to wipe our faces and readjust our masks.

Surgical masks are made of three plied layers of synthetic microfibers and extra-fine synthetic fibers, which block out much larger particles, but do a poor job of blocking the much smaller particles associated with COVID-19 viral transmission. The COVID-19 virus is extremely small, 60-140 nanometers, which is 1/1000th of a micron. A paper, “Filtration Performance of FDA-Cleared Surgical Masks,” stated that “The results suggest that not all FDA-cleared surgical masks will provide similar levels of protection to wearers against infectious aerosols in the size range of many viruses.” It was published in the Journal of International Society of Respiratory Protection in 2009.

Surgeons wear surgical masks for two reasons. First, we don’t want any blood or bodily fluid to hit us in the mouth, and second, we don’t want our saliva or drool to spill into the wound. We don’t wear them for viral protection. To be fair, there are a few articles that claim some surgical masks reduce viral transmission, from the person wearing the mask, but that’s assuming that droplets are the main cause of transmission when they may not be. Some believe aerosol spray is the major factor.

Those studies also assume that there’s no leakage from ill-fitting masks, since those were controlled environment studies. Aerosol spray is the extremely small viral particles that an infected person would give off when breathing. Droplets would be slightly larger, but still minuscule, and found in the kind of spray you see in a sneeze or when someone is speaking or coughing. (A side note: Masks with ties are more effective than masks with loops since they give a better seal.)

We hear a lot about “droplets.” Droplets aren’t some raindrop-size spit coming out of a person. Scientists usually mean something less than five microns (1/5,000 of an inch). The vast majority of COVID-19 is spread in much much smaller aerosol spray of 1/1,000 of a micron.

Dr. Kevin Fennely published a paper in The Lancet in 2020, stating that most viral pathogens are found in small particles. This conflicts with the view that larger droplets are responsible for most viral transmission. There have been other studies showing that very small particles (under 5 microns in size) may contain as much as nine times as much virus as larger particles (droplets). It’s also postulated that these smaller particles may be more dangerous, since they can penetrate deeper into the lungs. As a side note, when a droplet falls to the ground, it becomes aerosolized and is still a problem.

Those who believe that droplets are the main source for COVID-19 infections should also then support social distancing, but not the six feet we’re told. To be accurate, it should be anywhere from 18 to 27 feet. No one really knows where this six-foot social distancing “rule” came from. It most likely arose from the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends social distancing at one meter (39 inches). This was based on work by a researcher from 1930 who studied the spread of tuberculosis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently changed the social distance requirements in schools from 6 feet to 3 feet (slightly less than 1 meter).

So, in effect, we’ve upended our entire world to enact policies with limited impact, meaning that the cost associated with implementing them isn’t offset by the proposed gains.

COVID-19 is bad. It’s absolutely horrible, especially if you’re older and have underlying medical conditions that make you more vulnerable. The good news is that, for most of us, it will only be a mild infection, such as the flu. The chance for a young person under 40 to die from COVID-19 can be as low as 0.01 percent and even lower if vaccinated.

The unintended consequences of the draconian measures from this pandemic are tragic. A recent report by The Well Being Trust says there could be 75,000 more deaths by what is called “death by despair” (suicide, drugs) because of COVID-19. Those 75,000 will be young people, not the elderly. In other words, people who aren’t really at risk from COVID-19.

We’re beset by misinformation and confusing recommendations from our government. Vaccines are amazing, I’m a believer, yet some politicians, such as President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, publicly stated that they wouldn’t trust any vaccine coming out under former President Donald Trump, until they were in charge. Don’t wear masks, now wear masks. Wear two masks, since two is better than one. Vaccines will set you free, until they don’t. Therapeutics that can treat COVID-19 are frowned upon, and you must be evil if you even suggest the possibility. This isn’t a reliable information environment.

How we tell a medical story is critical for success. It’s the way we tell a cancer patient or a surgical patient how we’ll treat them that sets up a plan for success.

And that plan should be based on a rational balance of cost, reward, and freedom. We don’t force a cancer patient to get a treatment that will make them suffer and a similar argument could be made for the vaccine.

Even though I’m a believer in the vaccine, I understand those who aren’t and respect the right of a healthy 18-year-old woman to decline receiving it. For the 36 million people who have had COVID, there’s no need for them to get the vaccine, since they have natural immunity. For how long, we don’t know, but research suggests durable immunity. It’s simple to test and find out if you still have antibodies against COVID-19.

Back in 2007, we suggested that the nation stockpile N95 masks. No one listened. We’re now incapable of manufacturing those masks. They’re all made in China. So now, we can wear a cheesecloth mask, and we’re told that we’re saving our nation.

I personally have no problem with wearing a mask if and when it’s truly needed. It just has to be the right mask, an N95 or greater. And yet, these masks are distinctly uncomfortable and add an additional strain on your system. They make it harder to breathe, or in research terms, impede gaseous exchange. I often have to stop surgery to adjust my mask and “catch my breath,” I’ve been wearing masks for all of my professional life, so it’s easier for me. I’m not everyone, though.

The issue we have is defining when is mask-wearing warranted? Forcing vaccinated people, or those who have recovered from COVID-19 to wear a mask, makes little sense, other than making some people feel more secure. Forcing a 2-year-old to wear a mask is asinine, to say the least.

On top of that, mandates don’t work. The implied new goal of reducing the COVID-19 death rate to zero is unrealistic and will never happen. This is now endemic. If we mandate mask-wearing to “save” lives, then we might as well mandate prohibition, since there are an estimated 95,000 deaths per year from alcohol-related incidents. Many of those are from drunk drivers killing innocent bystanders or passengers. The same argument can be made here. Solutions need to be realistic, not ridiculous.

Our nation should be able to mass-produce something as simple as N95 respirators and distribute them to the nation when and if needed for some future catastrophe. There will surely be more pandemics coming. My point is, if we need a mask, make it something that works.

Cloth masks, or even surgical masks, are like tying a rope around your waist while driving and claiming it’s a seat belt.

It also isn’t too much of an exaggeration to say wearing a Gucci style face-covering, such as Nancy Pelosi has, is like asking an X-ray technician to wear their grandmother’s kitchen apron when taking X-rays.

Dr. Peter Weiss has been a frequent guest on local and national TV, newspapers, and radio. He was an assistant clinical professor of OB/GYN at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA for 30 years, stepping down so he could provide his clinical services to those in need when the COVID pandemic hit. He was also a national health care adviser for Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Intermezzo Guest Blog: Petr Svab; Experts’ Warning

This is a rather long piece compared to my usual blogs of ~1000 words, but well worth reading.  C.S. Lewis once wrote: “A tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.  The robber baron’s cruelty may sometime be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment without end for they do so with the approval of their conscience[s].”  Read on and pray for the USA.  This article has minor formatting and grammatical edits from the original.

Ideological Alignment Pushing America Toward Totalitarianism

The US Flag at half-mast in front of the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C.

Concerns about the nexus of big tech, big media, and big government.
By Petr Svab  January 20, 2021; Updated: January 21, 2021

The formation of a totalitarian state is just about complete in America as the most powerful public and private sector actors unify behind the idea that actions to stamp out dissent can be justified, according to several experts on modern totalitarian ideologies.

While many have warned about the rise of fascism or socialism in “the land of the free,” the ideas have largely been vague or fragmented, focusing on individual events or actors.  Recent events, however, indicate that seemingly unconnected pieces of the oppression puzzle are fitting together to form a comprehensive system, according to Michael Rectenwald, a retired liberal arts professor at New York University.

But many Americans, it appears, have been caught off guard or are not even aware of the newly forming regime, as the idea of elected officials, government bureaucrats, large corporations, the establishment academia, think tanks and nonprofits, the legacy media, and even seemingly grassroot movements all working in concert toward some evil purpose seems preposterous.  Is a large portion of the country in on a conspiracy?

The reality now emerges that no massive conspiracy was in fact needed — merely an ideological alignment and some informal coordination, Rectenwald argues.  “Despite the lack of formal overarching organization, the American socialist regime is indeed totalitarian, as the root of its ideology requires politically motivated coercion,” he told The Epoch Times.  The power of the regime is not yet absolute, but it is becoming increasingly effective as it erodes the values, checks, and balances against tyranny established by traditional beliefs and enshrined in the American founding.

The effects can be seen throughout society. Americans, regardless of their income, demographics, or social stature are being fired from jobs, getting stripped of access to basic services such as banking and social media, or having their businesses crippled for voicing political opinions and belonging to a designated political underclass.  Access to sources of information unsanctioned by the regime is becoming increasingly difficult.  Some figures of power and influence are sketching the next step, labelling large segments of society as “extremists” and potential terrorists who need to be “deprogrammed.”

While the onset of the regime appears tied to events of recent years — the presidency of Donald Trump, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic, the Capitol intrusion of January  6 — its roots go back decades.

Is It Really Totalitarian?
Totalitarian regimes are commonly understood as constituting a government headed by a dictator that regiments the economy, censors the media, and quells dissent by force.  That is not the case in America, but it is also a misunderstanding of how such regimes function, literature on totalitarianism indicates.

To claim power, the regimes do not initially need to control every aspect of society through government.  Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, used various means to control the economy, including gaining compliance of industry leaders voluntarily, or through intimidation, or through replacing the executives with party loyalists.

Similarly, the regime rearing its head in America relies on corporate executives to implement its agenda voluntarily but also through intimidation by online brigades of activists and journalists who take initiative to launch negative PR campaigns and boycotts to progress their preferred societal structure.

Also, Hitler initially did not control the spread of information via government censorship but rather through his brigades of street thugs, the “brown shirts,” who would intimidate and physically prevent his opponents from speaking publicly.  The tactic parallels the often successful efforts to “cancel” and “shut down” public speakers by activists and violent actors, such as Antifa.  Dissenting media in America have not been silenced by the government directly as of yet. 

But they are stymied in other ways.  In the digital age, media largely rely on reaching and growing their audience through social media and web search engines, which are dominated by Facebook and Google.  Both companies have in place mechanisms to crack down on dissenting media.  Google gives preference in its search results to sources it deems “authoritative.”  Search results indicate the company tends to consider media ideologically close to it to be more authoritative.  Such media can then produce hit pieces on their competitors, giving Google justification to slash the “authoritativeness” of the dissenters.  Facebook employs third-party fact checkers who have the discretion to label content as “false” and thus reduce the audience on its platform.  Virtually all the fact checkers focused on American content are ideologically aligned with Facebook.

Attempts to set up alternative social media have run into yet more fundamental obstacles, as demonstrated by Parler, whose mobile app was terminated by Google and Apple, while the company was kicked off Amazon’s servers.

To the degree that a totalitarian regime requires a police state, there is as yet no law in America targeting dissenters explicitly.  But there are troubling signs of selective, politically motivated enforcement.  Indicators go back to the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups or the difference in treatment received by former Trump adviser Lt. Gen Michael Flynn and former FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe — both allegedly lying to investigators but only one getting prosecuted.  The situation may get still worse as the restrictions tied to the CCP virus see broad swaths of ordinary human behavior being considered “illegal,” opening the door to nearly universal political targeting.

“I think the means by which a police state is being set up is the demonization of Trump supporters and the likely use of medical passports to institute the effective equivalent of social credit scores,” Rectenwald said.  While loyalty to the government and to a specific political party plays a major role, it is the allegiance to the ideological root of totalitarianism that gives it its foot soldiers, literature on the subject indicates.

Totalitarian Ideology
The element “that holds totalitarianism together as a composite of intellectual elements” is the ambition of fundamentally reimagining society — “the intention to create a ‘New Man,’” explained author Richard Shorten in Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present.

Various ideologies have framed the ambition differently, based on what they posited as the key to the transformation.  Karl Marx, co-author of the Communist Manifesto, viewed the control of the economy as primary, describing socialism as “socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature,” in Das Kapital.

Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, viewed race as primary.  People would become “socialized” — that is transformed and perfected — by removing Jews and other supposedly “lesser” races from society, he claimed.

The most dominant among the current ideologies stem from the so-called “critical theories,” where the perfected society is defined by “equity,” meaning elimination of differences in outcomes for people in demographic categories deemed historically marginalized.  The goal is to be achieved by eliminating the ever-present “white supremacy,” however the ideologues currently define it.

While such ideologies commonly prescribe collectivism, calling for national or even international unification behind their agenda, they are elitist and dictatorial in practice as they find mankind never “woke” enough to follow their agenda voluntarily.  In Marx’s prophecies, the revolution was supposed to occur spontaneously.  Yet it never did, leading Vladimir Lenin, the first head of the Soviet Union, to conclude that the revolution will need leadership after all.

“The idea is that you have some enlightened party … who understand the problem of the proletariat better than the proletariat does and is going to shepherd them through the revolution that they need to have for the greater good,” explained James Lindsay, author of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody.”

Elements of this intellectual foundation can be found in ideologies of many current political forces, from neo-nazis and anarcho-communists, through to progressives and to some extent even neoliberals and neoconservatives, Lindsay acknowledged.  “This is why you see so many people today saying that the only possible answers are a full return to classical liberalism or a complete rejection of liberalism entirely as fatally disposed to create progressivism, neoliberalism, etc.,” he said.

That is not to say these ideologies are openly advocating totalitarianism but rather that they inevitably lead to it.  The roadmap could be summarized as follows:

1. There is something fundamentally and intolerably wrong with current reality.
2. There is a plan to fix it requiring a whole society buy-in.
3. People opposing the plan need to be educated about the plan so they accept it.
4. People who resist the persuasion need to be reeducated, even against their will.
5. People who will not accept the plan no matter what need to be removed from society.

“I think that is the general thrust,” Lindsay said. “We can make the world the way we want it to be if we all just get on the same page and same project. It is a disaster, frankly.”

Points Four and Five Now Appear To Be In Progress.
Former Facebook executive Alex Stamos recently labeled the widespread questioning of the 2020 election results as “violent extremism,” which social media companies should eradicate the same way they countered online recruitment content from the ISIS terrorist group.  The “core issue,” he said, “is that we have given a lot of leeway, both in traditional media and on social media, to people to have a very broad range of political views” and this has led to the emergence of “more and more radical” alternative media like OAN and Newsmax.

Stamos then mused about how to reform Americans who have tuned into the dissenters.  “How do you bring those people back into the mainstream of fact-based reporting and try to get us all back into the same consensus reality?” he asked in a CNN interview.
“And can you? Is that possible?” CNN host Brian Stelter added.

The logic goes as follows: Trump claimed the election was stolen through fraud and other illegalities.  That has not been proven in court and is thus false.  People who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and managed to break inside and disrupt the electoral vote counting did so because they believed the election was stolen.  Therefore, anybody who questions the legitimacy of the election results is an extremist and potentially a terrorist.

With tens of thousands of troops assembled to guard the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) recently told CNN that all guard members who voted for Trump belong to a “suspect group” that “might want to do something,” alluding to past leaders of other countries who were “killed by their own people.”

Former FBI Director James Comey recently said the Republican party needs to be “burned down or changed.”

“They want a one party state,” commented conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza in a recent podcast.  “That is not to say they do not want an opposition.  They want a token opposition.  They want Republicans where they get to say what kind of Republican is okay.”

Just as Marx blamed the ills of the world on capitalists and Hitler on Jews, the current regime tends to blame various permutations of “white supremacy.”

“Expel the Republican members of Congress who incited the white supremacist attempted coup,” said Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) in a recent tweet, garnering some 300,000 likes.  She was referring to the Republican lawmakers who raised objections on Jan. 6 to election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.  Their objections were voted down.

“Can U.S. Spy Agencies Stop White Terror?” Daily Beast’s Jeff Stein asked in a recent headline, concluding that a call for “secret police” to sniff out “extremist” Americans “may well get renewed attention.”  Under the regime, allegations of election fraud — de facto questioning the legitimacy of the leader — have become incitement of terrorism.  YouTube (owned by Google), Facebook, and Twitter have either banned content that claims the election was rigged or are furnishing it with warning labels.  Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey was recently recorded as saying that banning the president’s account was just the beginning.  This approach closely mirrors that of the Chinese communist regime, which commonly targets dissidents for “subverting” the state or “spreading rumors.”

What Is The Alternative?
If calls for radically reorganizing the world are inherently totalitarian, how is the world to avoid them?  The question appears to be its own answer.  If totalitarianism inherently requires allegiance to its ideology, it cannot exist in a society with a lack of such allegiance.

The United States were founded on the idea that individual rights are God-given and unalienable.  The idea, rooted in traditional beliefs that human morality is of divine origin, stands a bulwark against any attempt to assail people’s rights even for their own good.

“If you are not a believer in actual God, you can posit a God’s ideal on the matter … We have to posit some arbiter who is above and beyond our own prejudices and biases in order to ensure these kinds of rights. … Because otherwise you have this infinitely malleable situation in which people with power and coercive potential can eliminate and rationalize the elimination of rights willy-nilly,” Rectenwald said.

Guest Blog: Dennis Prager: I Now Understand the “Good” German

by Dennis Prager, January 5, 2021

As my listeners and readers can hopefully attest, I have been on a lifelong quest to understand human nature and human behavior.  I am sad to report that I have learned more in the last few years, particularly in 2020, than in any equivalent period of time.

One of the biggest revelations concerns a question that has always plagued me: How does one explain the “good German,” the term used to describe the average, presumably decent German, who did nothing to hurt Jews but also did nothing to help them and did nothing to undermine the Nazi regime?  The same question could be asked about the average Frenchman during the Vichy era, the average Russian under Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev and their successors, and the millions of others who did nothing to help their fellow citizens under oppressive dictatorships.

These past few years have taught me not to so quickly judge the quiet German, Russian, etc.  Of course, I still judge Germans who helped the Nazis and Germans who in any way hurt Jews. But the Germans who did nothing? Not so fast.

What has changed my thinking has been watching what is happening in America (and Canada and Australia and elsewhere, for that matter).  The ease with which tens of millions of Americans have accepted irrational, unconstitutional and unprecedented police state-type restrictions on their freedoms, including even the freedom to make a living, has been, to understate the case, sobering.

The same holds true for the acceptance by most Americans of the rampant censorship on Twitter and all other major social media platforms.  Even physicians and other scientists are deprived of freedom of speech if, for example, they offer scientific support for hydroxychloroquine along with zinc to treat covid-19 in the early stages.  Board-certified physician Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, who has saved hundreds of covid-19 patients from suffering and/or death, has been banned from Twitter for publicizing his lifesaving hydroxychloroquine and zinc protocol.

Half of America, the non-left half, is afraid to speak their minds at virtually every university, movie studio and large corporation — indeed, at virtually every place of work.  Professors who say anything that offends the left fear being ostracized if they have tenure and being fired if they do not.  People are socially ostracized, publicly shamed and/or fired for differing with Black Lives Matter, as America-hating and white-hating a group as has ever existed.  And few Americans speak up.  On the contrary, when BLM protestors demand that diners outside of restaurants raise their fists to show their support of BLM, nearly every diner does.

So, then, who are we to condemn the average German who faced the Gestapo if he didn’t salute Hitler or the average Russian who faced the NKVD (the secret police and intelligence agency that preceded the KGB) if he didn’t demonstrate sufficient enthusiasm for Stalin?  Americans face the left’s cancel culture, but not left-wing secret police or reeducation camps.  (At least not yet — I have little doubt the left would send outspoken conservatives to reeducation camps if they could.)

I have come to understand the average German living under Nazism and the average Russian living under communism for another reason: the power of the media to brainwash.

As a student of totalitarianism since my graduate studies at the Russian Institute of Columbia University’s School of International Affairs (as it was then known), I have always believed that only in a dictatorship could a society be brainwashed.  I was wrong.  I now understand that mass brainwashing can take place in a nominally free society.  The incessant left-wing drumbeat of The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and almost every other major newspaper, plus The Atlantic, The New Yorker, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR, all of Hollywood and almost every school from kindergarten through graduate school, has brainwashed at least half of America every bit as effectively as the German, Soviet and Chinese communist press did (and in the latter case, still does).  That thousands of schools will teach the lie that is the New York Times’ “1619 Project” is one of countless examples. 

Prior to the lockdowns, I flew almost every week of the year, so I was approached by people who recognized me on a regular basis.  Increasingly, I noticed that people would look around to see if anyone was within earshot and then tell me in almost a whisper: “I support Trump” or, “I’m a conservative.”  The last time people looked around and whispered things to me was when I used to visit the Soviet Union.

In Quebec this past weekend, as one can see on a viral video, a family was fined and members arrested because six — yes, six — people gathered to celebrate the new year.  A neighbor snitched on them, and the celebrants were duly arrested.  The Quebec government lauded the snitches and asked for more public “collaboration.”

Snitches are likewise lauded and encouraged in some Democrat-run states and cities in America (Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti in March: “Snitches get rewards”) and by left-wing governments in Australia.  Plenty of Americans, Canadians and Australians are only too happy to snitch on people who refuse to lock down their lives.  All this is taking place without concentration camps, without a Gestapo, without a KGB and without Maoist reeducation camps.

That’s why I no longer judge the average German as easily as I used to.  Apathy in the face of tyranny turns out not to be a German or Russian characteristic.  I just never thought it could happen in America.
Dennis Prager

c.a.’s note:  Additionally, there are some serious questions that need to be answered about who broke into the Capitol.  You will not find this reported on CNN, CNBC, MSN or other major news outlets . . . yet.   Pro-Trumpers did enter, but they were not the ones initiating the illegal actions.  There are many Pro-Trumpers who are at the far-right fringe that did wrong things, and these will be and should be prosecuted, but even those crimes pale in comparison to riots in our cities last summer.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/video-trump-supporters-stop-antifa-from-breaking-into-capitol_3649380.html